That's been the thorn in independent or small businesses paw as of late

How do Google define 'best' - again it's by popularity, linkbacks, who's trending/talking about you, where are you active on social media, what reputable businesses are talking about you etc....

They can't automatically define 'content' on it's own merit. If it was, we'd all stand a better chance!

To get there you either need a lot of luck, large pockets (for advertising to become known) or already heavily established. Meaning big businesses get to the top of the engines rather than being a level playing field.

I was thinking about the ability to be able to continue to push quality links using exact match (or similar and relevant) anchor text to an exact match domain without potentially being penalised for it, thus increasing the potential value of the exact match domain.

From what ive read, we're talking too many backlinks with same anchor text... Thing is, EMD can't avoid the EMD term as anchor as it's the name of the site?! Surely if there was one phrase you would be given benefit of the doubt, it's this one?